


Witchcraft

by AlphaStarr



Category: Fire Emblem: Kakusei | Fire Emblem: Awakening
Genre: Abusive Parents, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Everyone Dies, Assassination plot, Awkward Crush, Blood Magic, Byronic Hero, Corporal Punishment, Fictional Economy, Fictional Government, Fictional Religion & Theology, Gothic Ylissean, Hints of Lon'qu's Tragic Backstory, Libra's Tragic Backstory, M/M, Missing Worldbuilding, Slow Burn, Spoiler-y Tags In Endnotes, Starvation, Treason, child endangerment
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-28
Updated: 2018-07-27
Packaged: 2019-06-17 11:16:57
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 7
Words: 19,903
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15460179
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AlphaStarr/pseuds/AlphaStarr
Summary: They forget this in the history books: Ylisse once had a cruel king, too.In timelines fractured by the rise of Grima and the passage of heroes into the past, the Crusader-King would die before his eldest daughter came of age, indeed, before her years numbered in the double-digits. In those worlds, Ylisse would taste peace for fifteen years before war crossed their borders once more.But so, too, there are other worlds, worlds aplenty, and the twists of time are not always so kind.The AU where Emmeryn was never Exalt, and her father continues to see his crusade against Plegia to the end. In a Ylisse torn apart by war, it is those upon the streets who suffer most-- and there, too, where rebellion starts to brew.





	1. Prologue: Hex

**Author's Note:**

> I replayed FEA and remembered how much I love this ship. Also, _worldbuilding_. (Much of what I've garnered of Chrom's dad and his reign is from Chrom's dialogue at the start of [Chapter 6](https://serenesforest.net/wiki/index.php/Chapter_6:_Foreseer_\(Script\)), as well as some of Gangrel's lines in [Chapter 5](https://serenesforest.net/wiki/index.php/Chapter_5:_The_Exalt_and_the_King_\(Script\)). The rest is all extrapolated.)
> 
> This fic exists because Chrom's dad being awful is mentioned maybe 3 times tops, and isn't really covered in any supports. Every Ylissean older than Chrom should have _some_ memory of what happened, right? Several years of war. Involuntary military conscription. Starvation in Ylisse. Throwing actual rocks at actual child Emmeryn from the old Exalt's death up to a time where Chrom and Lissa were old enough to "understand her pain." Nobody mentions any of it.
> 
> Ergo, fifteen year extension of the canon Ylisse vs Plegia backstory. But Libra-centric. (Let's be real, I just wanted to write Byronic Hero Libra with lots of broody prose.)
> 
> M rating is for depictions of violence, and not the smut which is more commonly found. (There is no smut. Sorry.) I reviewed several fic rating guidelines before deciding T didn't quite cut it.
> 
> **More detailed, spoiler-y warnings in the endnotes.** Fic tags should cover the basics, but if you feel the content could become unsafely upsetting, please use your discretion.

  **Prologue: Hex**  

* * *

They forget this in the history books: Ylisse once had a cruel king, too.

In years to come, he would be known better for his children than his deeds, for it was through his issue the Exalted lineage gave rise to Exalt Emmeryn, a legend to her people, and Lord Chrom, he who defeated the Fell Dragon. Even, in time, that Exalt's name would be lost to memory, forgotten entirely but for his war-- the Crusader-King, the people called him, among less savory names.

These brutal campaigns in times long past saw the Ylissean army crossing into Plegian territory to slaughter all those who yet claimed worship of Grima, the draconic herald of the end. The war, too, was no kinder to the king's own people. The lands of Ylisse became unable to sustain its struggling armies against the Plegian resistance, least of all when every able-bodied citizen found themselves drafted into military service. Farmers' children marched into battle, untrained.

That Exalt was a man held firm in his faith, determined that his self-righteous crusade would stamp out all that stood against the tenets of Naga. Like the Hero-King he was descended from, he would purge the continent of all evils, and his own nation was no exception. He passed law upon law upholding his faith as the only _right_ religion, taking it upon himself to save the souls of every Ylissean-- by force, if not persuasion.

The streets of Ylisstol ran red with the blood of dissenters, their penance paid at the whipping-post.

Bearing the most severe of these punishments was the crime of dark magic, _all_ dark magic, hated above all else in this Exalt's reign. For, too, were King Marth's foes not chiefly dark mages? Were they not the selfsame sorcerers and dark knights which, even now, populated the damned nation of Plegia?

But, no-- in truth, though there were some dark spells forbidden, so too did the Hero-King of old count sorcerers among his allies, so too did scholars of the highest order turn to tomes of dark magic to devise innovations to the very _anima_ tomes used among Ylisse's troops. Only the violent spells that dealt with spilling lifeblood had been banned before the Crusader-King's rule, and even those only because they had no purpose save to cause harm.

The Crusader-King had but little faith in his great ancestors' judgement in that regard.

Brewing potions, save for some standardized cures, would mean a life in the dungeons. The magic tomes used by sorcerers in battle were burned _en masse_ , only a handful remaining secreted away in hidden libraries. Even mild sleeping hexes witch-doctors used to cure insomniacs bore the sentence of a fortnight in the pillory.

A scant few dared to disobey, finding themselves clapped in the stocks or publicly whipped or, depending on the crime, even executed. Those who professed to their crime and repented would be given due mercy, provided they turned in any other dark mages among their acquaintance. Those who resisted, in turn, would be brought to the Exalt's justice, and there would be no façade of mercy anymore.

There exists a word for it, now: _witch-hunt_.

In timelines fractured by the rise of Grima and the passage of heroes into the past, Ylisse's most vicious king would die before his eldest daughter came of age, indeed, before her years numbered in the double-digits. In those worlds, Ylisse would taste the sanctity of peace for fifteen years before war broke on their borders once more.

But so, too, there are other worlds, worlds aplenty, and the twists of time are not always so kind.

There are timelines where merciless kings destined to die fail to meet their ends, and in lieu of over a decade's peace, Ylisse tastes nothing but their holy-war, led by an Exalted king determined to see it through to the very end. In those worlds, the citizens suffer in their starvation, the travesties of war, the laws and streets of Ylisstol painted red, red, red with hate. The riots come, then, to the capitol-- not by any passing of the king, but by the rage of a people hungering for peace, blessed peace, at last.

It is this realm where our tale begins, within peasants' quarters in the slums, where lived those common folk injured the most of all.


	2. Chapter 1: Anathema

  **Chapter 1: Anathema**  

* * *

Once upon a time, before paths and timelines had yet to diverge, there lived a couple during that age of the Crusader-King's rule. Their child, not so much younger than the Exalt's own heir, perhaps did not enthrall his parents as thoroughly as a newborn ought.

The timing and coincidence of his birth less than ideal, the babe prevented his mother from her work and subsequently the necessary income. His father, too, still on a soldier's meager pay, privately questioned the circumstances of a birth during his absence at war-- and perhaps it was that quiet seed of doubt that prevented him from ever growing truly attached to his son.

The child's first year passed unexceptionally, perhaps, as far as young children go. But that year, the farmers turned their plowshares to swords, and scarcity pushed the value of bread higher than anyone had ever seen before. His mother, only a pouchful of coins to her name, could but scarce afford to feed the child, who seemed like a bottomless pit in her eyes. Strained and stressed, forced to either confront her own gnawing hunger or the child's hellish shrieking, she found herself sorely tempted to rid herself of him on the spot.

The father, naturally, was no help at all-- nearly his entire pay was withheld by the Ylissean state in order to fund his mess hall fare, his travel expense, his equipment upkeep. What scant few coins he managed to send back oft found themselves in the pockets of dishonest postmen, for they too had begun to feel the pressure of Ylisse's scarcity.

The child's next year brought with it all that was to be expected of a child not quite two years of age, and though by then his mother had returned to her job, he did not take well to being brought along as she worked. He cried, so often and at such length that the other workers complained of it until he was soothed; he toddled and crawled and knocked over anything he could set his hands upon. He tested many a patience that year, but there was still sympathy to be had among the others among them who had children themselves.

No, the worst of his behavior was saved for the child's third year alive, when he bit the foreman so viciously that he bled. Then, there was at last an ultimatum: leave the child elsewhere, or forfeit the job. Her sole source of income was non-negotiable, and so the child was sent away-- first, to neighbors, who complained of his bawling on through the day, and then to relatives further afield who sent him back within a fortnight. These endeavors failed, his mother thought to herself that she had done the best she could, and locked him alone in the house with all breakables out of his reach. That would have to do, she decided, until he learned to behave.

But it was the fourth year that was hardest indeed, because soon thereafter came a letter citing his father's dishonorable conduct within the armed ranks. The Ylissean state charged him on accusations of desertion for attempting to depart the battlefield before he could bleed out-- and the Crusader-King brought down his judgement, discharging the soldier entirely without pay. He returned home so thoroughly scarred that his own wife but scarce recognized him enough to scream at him, furious, for his inability to care for their child (if, indeed, he was _their_ child).

"I sent back all I had," he yelled back at her, the volume of his voice raised above the child's cries. "You're the one who never sent any letters!"

"I received _none_ of what you sent," she cried back, slamming the closet door and shutting the boy away. "How should I have paid for ink? You left me completely alone with _that thing_ howling at all hours of the day, and not even a coin to spare!"

"Does the child at least have a name?" the father sneered, the scar on his face twisting grotesquely. "You never wrote to say."

"Does it... have a name?" the mother asked in turn, realizing that in her distress, she had never bothered to give him one. "No," she said finally. "I had been waiting for your next paid leave to decide, and then I forgot."

Then, feeling rather foolish, the father went so far as to inquire: "So... is it a boy, or is it a girl?"

"Boy," she replied with a derisive snort. "Hardly as if it matters.  _You_ can take care of it for the _next_  four years."

"A boy," said the father shrewdly. "Whether he starves now or dies afield in battle ten years from now, what difference does it make? Is there no dark sorcerer who will pay for his blood, as there are in Plegia? No church that will take him, in spite of Naga's tenets?"

"I have tried," she exhaled, angry and exhausted. "The child screams like the damned no matter where I attempt to leave him, as if he knows no words. The sorcerers all flee, fearing the knights' notice; the clerics all pin me with their judging eyes. He is possessed-- a demon wearing a child's skin, a changeling. An accursed, _wretched_ creature."

"Then," the father reasoned with a twisted logic, "We cannot be faulted for ousting evil from our home and ridding ourselves of it as quickly as we can; the King Exalted does the same within his nation. I have seen dark magic aplenty at war. Who is to say I do not recognize some wicked demon stealing the form of my child?"

"Yes," the mother agreed. "We must oust it as quickly as possible!"

She flung open the door and retrieved the boy, hastening to the most abandoned alleyway amidst the twists of Ylisstol. None but beggars frequented places as these, and even so, the majority of their number clung closer to marketplaces while it was light out.

Thus, there was no one to hear when the child began to cry out again, and no one to watch as he clung to his mother so desperately that he had to be struck hard upon the back of his neck and forced to let go. Left in the streets with no one in the world, he howled and sobbed but nobody, this time, came to quiet him. Nobody came to soothe the frightened, lonely heart of a child whose parents had abandoned him in some strange part of the city not even a grown man could be expected to know. 

The blood from where his father's glove cut him dripped down his neck; the droplets vanished into a street already painted red.

His wails were met by unsympathetic ears, there in the alleyways and gutters; they did not earn him even the slightest child's comfort. At night, strange people came to hit him for his disturbance, to beat him until he quieted. When daylight came, he sobbed for that smallest kind of succor to no avail, and his childish heart grew hard within those unforgiving streets, colder than ever in these times of war.

The beginnings of hatred stirred within him for the parents who had neglected him while he lived under their roof, who had abandoned him upon the roads of Ylisstol.

His was a life of starvation for food and kindness both, the scarcity of crops and devaluing coin driving even the nobility to miserliness. All he had for company were older beggars, too wise to share their meals with a child too likely to soon die, and cruel older children who accosted him, beat him near-broken once they realized he had nothing to steal.

In time, he too learned to steal to eat, like the others who wandered the streets with their hungry eyes and hungrier bellies. Those who failed to learn this meanest of trades did not survive, their skeletal corpses set upon by dark mages who had gone underground or swept away in the mornings by the knights.

(Perhaps, indeed, that death was more merciful than the punishment of life.)

Thief though he was, that child was not a particularly skillful one. What few of his successes could be attributed to naught but magic, summoned by plea to his fingertips, and though he could not have known it at the time, this too was dark-- the summoning of the elements with no tome at hand, nothing but the raw ache of emotion to guide him.

He was caught in his crimes, and caught frequently, whipped for his theft until he cried for a mercy that never came. Switches beat down upon him, hands tied helplessly to the nearest post, hitting his skin with a sharp sting and the burning heat of a red, red welt, over and over until the punishment was complete. There was not even a pause as the the lashings broke skin, then drew blood, coming to end only once one-five-fifteen hits had been counted out at last.

The gods' salvation was the reason given for this punishment, delivered with a prayer:  _in Naga's name_. The wounded child was not yet old enough to forgive the goddess who had been evoked only to bring him pain, yes, unceasing pain as his lash-wounds hung open in the air, unbandaged.

(No stave charges were to be wasted on an urchin unlikely to survive the winter. Not when they were so sorely needed on the front lines of battle.)

His future was bleak-- black, black like the dead of night. But then, there was light which cut through the darkness, the streets of Ylisstol's noble quarters set ablaze in riot. 

A moonless sky lay as canvas for a people's patience worn thin with time, for the limits of the human heart could only take but _so much_ resentment. Where the commoners labored and starved and sent their children off to die at war, the nobles ate well, dressed warmly, afforded their scions all the best benefits of training. The angry proletarians put fire to those who had yet to suffer, truly _suffer_  from the years at battle, and the clamorous flames were such that they reached even the king in his stony, cold castle, behind his ironclad knights.

Everyone who had been in the noble quarter that night was detained, questioned, and if suspicion was great enough, condemned to execution. Even but failure to adequately answer the Exalt's demands was then a crime worthy of punishment. There was no mercy to be had that night, when even the slightest of errors made as good as a damnation.

The perpetrator would never be discovered, no, not in truth. But in the Crusader-King's eyes, there could be but one source for these unexplained misdeeds: _magic_.

The knights scoured the city under the Crusader-King's command, looking for all the world like horsemen heralding the endtimes as the city burned, inferno soaring bright. Fire caught to the city, and it was the common folk tasked to extinguish it, steel and horses needed to carry out the search for evil in their midst.

There in the alleyways where young urchins slept, and there, where an accursed child lay awake in fear, the bloodied streets tasted the warhorses' hooves, the spell-seller who penned tomes used by the king's very own mage army dragged from her home, protesting.

"There is nothing," she proclaimed. "Nothing save for a library of books, which I lend to those who wish to learn. I was asleep all night; there can be nothing dark about it-- for goodness' sake, Sir Gilbert, you _know_ me!"

"The king ordered the detainment and inquisition of all mages in Ylisstol," the knight reported. "Nothing more."

"Mother?" came a perplexed voice, a young girl's alarm audible even from where beggars lay in the streets. "Mother, what's happening?"

"Her, too," someone added, and then the sound of clanking armor. "Sorcery is in her blood. It could have been a mistake, young mages lose control all the time."

"Under what crimes could you possibly arrest a five-year-old child?" the spellwriter scoffed, unaware that not one street away lay a child who had already been arrested once, twice, a dozen times.

"Fire," replied a knight. "In the nobles' quarter."

A moment's pause, and then, another's voice: "Search the building."

The child in the alley held his breath, close enough yet that he could feel the thud-thud-thud of boots upon stairs reverberating within his thin chest. Do not look my way, he pleaded in his mind. But the knights searched on, no heed paid to the orphans which laid upon every Ylissean street these days.

And then, there was the verdict like a death sentence: "Dark magic tomes! On the basement shelf!"

The spell-seller herself sounded surprised by the find. "I thought I had burned the last of my stock. I used to write Ruin tomes, for the mages in the army..."

"All dark magic is evil," someone sneered with disgust, and with the distinctive noise of gathering phlegm, they spat at the mage's feet. "Lock 'er up! Take 'er away!"

There was a raucous clamor for a moment, the sound of armor jostled on horseback as the knights rode fast back to the castle. And then, for street urchins young and old, silence-- and then, a scramble for a door rapidly broken open.

A knot of those who had no homes charged into the open building in search of a mouthful to eat that might be left behind, ravaged what little bread and vegetable there might be, stole all that could be sold. The older, more experienced vagrants quickly grabbed the most valuable artifacts, making a deft escape. Those who remained set themselves to squabbling violently over all that was left, and then, like a swarm, they departed when there was nothing more to take.

But, then, the worst thief among them lingered, everything but a mouthful of dry flour he had already swallowed wrested from his hands by the others. He searched the house, he scoured once more, just in case some little trinket had been forgotten, something he could sell or trade at the market for a bowlful of broth, perhaps bread if he were fortunate enough.

And there, with both hands (empty now), the child pried away the ruined wood of a bookcase (empty now). There, he found a dark tome of the truly forbidden kind, saved from burning by its knowledge-loving keeper, and with cautious hands, he pried it from its secret alcove and house _truly_ lay empty, now.

Perhaps, in another time, the king would perish before those imprisoned that night made it to the gallows. Perhaps the will of the gods themselves would strike him down, afflict him with a seizure of the heart. Perhaps his more kindhearted daughter would reassess those crimes and pardon all who had been unjustly sentenced. Perhaps they could be saved.

Perhaps in another time, but not this one.

The spell-writer, she died. Her little daughter Miriel died. A child-thief only seeking sweets that night died. The last taguel, caught in the crosshairs, died. Somewhere in Plegia, in that space where there was battle in lieu of ceasefire, the young mercenary Gregor died, and Henry never came into being for his Grimleal parents had long before died.

But that child in the gutters of Ylisstol lived; though his clothes stank of urine and blood, he lived. 

He took that book into his heart, read after-dark by the light of Ylisstol, burning. Those darkest spells thrived on the pain it found within, and in lieu of Naga there was power, heady power at his hands. What succor was once out of his reach came to him with a summoning hex; those who would beat him and bleed him dry met their ends, instead, at hands which twisted dark spells between them. Through the rites of blood and darkness, he _lived_.

And from that single, precious tome, the child's finger traced over a small, Hermetic symbol on the very edge of a forbidden spell. _Libra_ , he mouthed, and chose it for his own name.


	3. Chapter 2: Lifetaker

  **Chapter 2: Lifetaker**  

* * *

When the riots began, Princess Emmeryn knew it: she could sit idly by no more.

Though her years did not yet number in the double-digits, the gentle princess' heart cried out for her people, dying for the want of peace. She was not old enough yet, no, a child still under her father's guardianship and command, but she yearned to soothe all Ylisse's ills, just as she had learned healing from the church and its clerics. With what little power afforded a child of the royal family, young Emmeryn with hopeful hands fed her people thin broths, made of all the castle itself could spare.

In turn, the starving people pelted her with rocks, furious with all she and her family still yet withheld. In their eyes, this was not Emmeryn the kind young cleric, whose empathy and faith drove her to confront the rioting people with her own hands-- but Princess Emmeryn, scion of the Exalted family, the very source of the people's suffering in this war the king called "holy."

They shouted abuse at her, spat at her in the red-paved streets as she walked the road between the castle and the city's sole soup-kitchen. All that saved her from further harm was the threat of the king's own punishment and a skinny squire-girl, trembling so hard that her too-large armor rattled.

(In these times of war, young Phila was all the king could spare for the safety of his own daughter and heir.)

She never showed the people her pain, no, only her beloved siblings could see how much their anger truly hurt her. But for children on the streets, but scarcely nearing Emmeryn's own age, there was no sympathy to be had for a sheltered princess who did not truly understand what travesties her own father's law had brought, had never even witnessed them with her own two eyes.

There was hatred aplenty in Libra's heart, too, injury enough for the self-righteous Exalt and his sanctimonious daughter both, for did she not act in the name of the same gods evoked when they'd brought the lash down upon his back? He was far, far from the Libra of another time and place-- a future which might still have been-- who would have died for Emmeryn, Exalted then. But here and now, fire burned within him, Elfire and Arcfire and Bolganone, like the streets of Ylisstol had burned that fateful night.

(They burned every night, now-- Libra himself had helped see to it.)

Their king could not be reasoned with in words, Naga's holy-book a shield and the Hero-King's prayers a sword. Where his people could not affect him in his stony castle and his stonier heart with their pleas and protests, they discovered this: even kings could not ignore their own capitols ablaze.

It was not always Libra who set fire to the streets, roaring hot like Hell with fire, red fire. But if it was not Libra, it was some other peasant's discontent which fueled the flames, and all of dying Ylisstol burned at the pyre. Then, the make of their clothes and their tutors and training meant nothing, for there was no bread anymore, only ash, and even the nobles learned what it could be to hunger.

But there in their despair Libra glutted himself on the profits of their spilled blood, year after year his fingers growing older as they painted in red, pure red, runes and circles and the magic of those darkest arts. Even ash could be made into a simple meal of bread and apples with blood-spells appropriately applied, and by the time he came of age it was _Libra_  at whose mercy the commonfolk lay.

The land of Ylisse was barren now, had lay barren for over fifteen years. Only old women and veterans too sickly to fight still plowed the fields. The farmers who had first turned sickles to swords, their daughters and sons fought now; they defended what little there was left of Ylisse. The Grimleal Hierophant King Validar bespelled the bodies of the dead to fight on Plegia's behalf, desperate when there were too few men left to fight, and Ylisse had no such luxury-- soon they would succumb if the able-bodied did not take up the blade, and even hunger was but second to fear.

So it was to Libra the scum of Ylisse would hie, in the catacombs of Ylisse's sewers where the sorcerer made his home, down beneath the drain-ditches where he had lain as a child. Those most desperate would give him their lives, the lives of their families and children, and with the lives taken through those most secret executions he would summon feasts from realms away, provisions enough to feed an entire town. And there, out from the gutters, Ylisstol's own streets seemed to be bleeding red.

Libra could not for the life of him recall if they had ever been any other color.

He grew up from a parentless vagrant who had struggled to survive into a man who dealt only in death-- hypnotizing to look upon, some said, but terrible to behold. Like the angel-reapers of legend, coming for a man's condemned soul. 

"Monster," they called him in whispers. "Demon," they accused, and did not know the meaning of that word.

Yes, he thought, he was the monster who took lives there in the backstreets of Ylisse; yes, he was the demon his own parents had cast out for evil. This he would not deny. But it was the heartlessness of Ylisstol which had stripped away his sensitivity, the dark, blood-dark magic that took root in him which warped what humanity there was still left.

If he was a monster, it was only because the unforgiving city had made him one. If he was a demon, it was only because their magic was all he could trust. Those who reviled him knew not what he truly was; they did not understand who they themselves were. Every morsel of food in Ylisstol now had been bought with the price of blood, be it by Libra's hands or another's.

 _Hypocrites_ , he thought, vindictive, and when his own father stood before him (unrecognizable but for the scars), there was no room in Libra's heart for a mercy he had never himself known. That blood was not fit even for sacrifice, and he Wasted the body until there was not enough of it left to scatter to the four winds.

Eventually, even the castle began to feel the effects of its king's imprudence, expending the lives of men at war in lieu of planting the land. The Prince Chrom only but came of age before his father sent him off to battle, and the Princess Lissa, scarcely fourteen herself, only drank weak broth anymore-- like a member of the castle staff.

It was this, more than even their own hunger, which drove the nobility to Libra's door, the place where castle-maids dumped reeking chamber-pots into the city sewage. It was this which drove them into narrow pathways paralleling the viscous waters of Ylisstol, thick and heady with ferrous blood more than even human waste. It seemed, to those noblest among them, as if all Ylisse had bled into the gutters of its capitol-- but still, firm and prim, she did not balk at meeting Ylisstol's darkest mage.

"Lady Maribelle," Libra noted, some small hint of surprise in his voice. "When I received your letter, I did not think you would yourself come to see me."

"You know very well why I'm here," she replied with shoulders squared. "I am not so naïve that I've no clue what's truly feeding all of Ylisse."

"So even the famous Duchess of Themis has come to require services such as these," he coolly stepped down the unbannistered stairs to meet her on his ritual-chamber floor. "How strange it must be when, not even a year ago, you were among those who most vocally opposed them."

"I _still_ oppose them, you wretched creature," Maribelle's voice took on a tone of distaste. "Killing people in dark rites, even in exchange for summoning food from who-knows-where beyond the æther. They say you'll take any lives, even those of children. It just isn't right! How anyone can live with themselves, making their living through _murder_... it is completely beyond me."

"I see," replied Libra, a slight curiosity rising in him at that. "Perhaps you can ask the king for _his_ reasons, next time you see him."

"You are horrible," Lady Maribelle reasserted, lifting her chin vindictively. "You, and all that you do, it's all horrible!"

Libra chuckled, low and hollow. In the same tone, he replied: "You are _alive_."

Knowing that she, too, partook in meals which had been bought by blood, Maribelle had no dignified response except to at last turn her attention to their business. "I gave you the terms of my trade, heathen. One life, in exchange for the maximum quantity of appropriately-preserved rations one can possibly obtain from such an exchange. No less than what might feed twenty persons for a twelvemonth, ideally more."

"If you hold no complaint with common military rations, it is not at all impossible," Libra answered mildly. Then, his eyes flicked to the young knight at the Lady's side, silent up until that point. "Is she the sacrifice, then?"

"Milady, please," the girl begged, but it was not for her own life. Instead, she pleaded, "Let it be me. Even the sorcerer thinks it best."

"Hush now, Cordelia," Maribelle replied, casting a suspicious glance in Libra's direction. "After your family serving House Themis so loyally all these generations... you've picked a fine time to start questioning orders."

"The idea was mine," she insisted. "The... the _sacrifice_. If I had not said anything about it, you might not have even thought to come. It should be me."

"Don't be foolish," and the Lady deigned even to touch her servant's shoulder. She raised an eyebrow, "If you were gone, who would stand guard for Princess Lissa? Certainly not me. I've such little training with a blade at all. No, if someone must die to feed the princesses of House Ylisse, it must be one who can do nothing more for them. My lord father is gone, and the estate overrun with Plegians, now. All I have left are my embroidered handkerchiefs and my servants-- one of which will do nothing to remedy the issue, and the other which I cannot, in good conscience, order into death."

Then, it was Cordelia who pinned the sorcerer with a glare, the darkest glare she could muster through her tears. "Know this, blackmage: the woman whose life you take today is the best and most selfless of Ylissean nobility. She could have had me, or Kellam, or anyone else in her service take her place to die. We would have gone willingly."

"I see," replied Libra, perplexed by the apparent importance of those words. Attempting to puzzle out what she meant, "My spells do not hold lineage important in their calculations, if that is your meaning. The rites of dark magic will not value your blood any more simply because it is blue."

"Do not deign take me for a fool, sorcerer. I'm well aware it doesn't matter _whose_ blood it is," Maribelle bit, discarding her disguise cloak in Cordelia's arms. "I don't expect _you_ to understand my reasons. A baseborn, gutter-dwelling troglodyte like yourself... hardly a wonder that you know _nothing_ of loyalty."

"Nothing, indeed," Libra repeated, and could not deny how those words cut him to the bone. What idea of loyalty _did_ he know, when his own parents had discarded him as quickly as they could? When everyone he'd ever exchanged words with would just as willingly exchange blows?

"You cannot yet see why I do this, sorcerer... but someday, when Princess Emmeryn takes to the throne, you very well might," Maribelle took a deep, steady breath before deftly stepping into the center of the circle and pretending that her legs did not tremble with fear. She put on what she thought to be her bravest, most dignified face, "Get on with it, then. "

And then, for a second, Libra's heart ached with some small, human sympathy which had not yet died out, some last bit of light which lingered within him. A familiar feeling filled his bosom, that same he always felt when his sacrifices were very, very voluntary, or very, very young.

He was not as inhuman as they said he was; he was not as inhuman as he pretended to be.

"It doesn't hurt, you know," he told her, so soft that he seemed like an entirely different person. "It is designed to be painless."

"I've no need for a life-taker's _pity_ ," said Maribelle, sharp unto the end, and Libra at last had a word for that feeling.

It did not stop him from opening his spellbook. It did not stop him from casting. It did not stop Maribelle's body from hitting the ground, lifeless already before her flesh shredded with the force of the next spell, veins gushing open and filling the grooves in the floor with blood, blood, blooming around her and painting the lines of the ritual-circle, the runes.

A vast gate opened there upon the floor, burning up what little remained of the Duchess' mortal flesh, and then from a realm where such provisions were plenty came boxes upon boxes of military rations, stacked like in the cargo-holds of naval vessels, food enough to feed the castle for a twelvemonth and perhaps a little more. The maidknight's eyes were wide like saucers, for even she in all sixteen of her years had never before seen that darkest magic in its complete performance-- those rumors in the marketplace then proved themselves true.

When at last the spell was done, and the sorcerer had shut his tome, Libra turned to the only person left still in his company, that young knight with hair as red as the streets of Ylisse. "It is done."

"Yes. I suppose it is," Cordelia replied, her eyes dropping to the floor. Not even a hint of blood remained to show that Maribelle had ever been there, had ever existed at all, and soon the knight began to weep for the woman who had been her liege, the woman who had been her _friend_.

Libra sighed, then, and pity-- now that he knew what it was, that a name for it existed at all-- it seemed to grow ever stronger within him. Then, he was not Libra who had embraced the epithet of _demon_ , he was not Libra whose angry magic ended lives as easily as he breathed. He was just an orphan, abandoned by his parents on the street, with nothing at all to comfort him.

"Here," he said, extending a handkerchief in her direction.

Cordelia accepted it and wiped her eyes, red like her liege's blood. Then, with a note of surprise: "This handkerchief... it's Lady Maribelle's."

"She attempted to pay me in advance with heirloom embroidery," Libra pulled his hand away, unable to so much as meet her accusing eyes. "I have no need for such things... it would be better served in the hands of someone capable of caring for it."

"I--" Cordelia started, surprise written all over her face. "Th-thank you, I suppose..."

"Make no mention of it," said Libra, blond hair shifting in the light of the burning city, fires that crept in through the catch-basins and rainwater-grates. The picture he made would have been beautiful, if not for the dark tome he clutched in hand. "If I may but pose a question?"

"Yes?"

"How long," he began. "How long have the gentry of Ylisse gone hungry?"

Cordelia seemed to search him with her eyes, as if she were looking for some hidden sign. Finally, she decided to speak: "My parents dreamed of being farmers, once."

And with those words, she set to work packing the supplies into the horsecart she'd brought, preparing to complete her liege's last order to slip back into the castle with that precious, blood-bought cargo in tow.

(If Libra saw her guiltily sneak the tiniest morsel of dry hardtack in her escape, he said nothing of it.)

These now were not the knights in the tales of old, who loyally served their Hero-King and his people as one-- they were not the Bull and the Panther, they were not the Knight-Queen Caeda. These were now knights who fought only for basic survival, unable to care for the commoners' plights when they themselves could but barely survive.

With circumstances so dire, even nobility hungered for peace, and even the peasantry had reconciled their opinion of Princess Emmeryn. An Exalt sanctimonious in her love of peace was still better than her father, sanctimonious in his love of war. 

The rest of the world could not for long ignore an outcry of help on so large a scale, not when Ylisse and Plegia both seemed on the verge of dying out. The squabbling Dynast Lords of Valm heard tell of a king so fanatic in his religion that it would spell certain doom if he set his sights on the Mila Tree. The people of Plegia, at the heart of the matter, had begun to lose hope that their nation would survive. And those so-called barbarians of Regna Ferox to the North-- they knew not what to make of those rumors that once Hierophant Validar was dead, the Crusader-King would come to try and "civilize" them, too.

But there in Ylisse, the burning-red streets of Ylisstol, the people had reached their boiling point long ago. They were a people with nothing more left to lose, and Libra, in the sewers alone, the least left of all.

Maribelle's words had cut deep, that night that he'd killed her, but they reached his heart where nothing else had touched. It was true, he could not see that which drove her to self-sacrifice, had never known anything which might be so dearly worth protecting-- but she had said this, too: that when Princess Emmeryn sat on the throne, he too might learn of what she was willing to die to feed.

The flames of Ylisstol were no longer a mark of its citizens' despair, not in Libra's eyes. They had become the flames of revolution, and Libra had been waiting his whole life to revolt.


	4. Chapter 3: Slow Burn

  **Chapter 3: Slow Burn**  

* * *

There was word of it in the streets, one morning-- that deep, deep in the night, someone had tried to kill the King Ylisse.

Knights ran rampant in the roads, passing out depictions of the perpetrator to anyone who chanced to stop by. One slim page even fell through to where Libra dwelt, hidden deep beneath the city, saved from drowning in the sewage by a murderer's hand.

He gazed upon the page with curiosity, took in the blurry artist's sketch of a hooded man, his height labeled to be more than six feet and likely as not an exaggeration from the Exalt who had almost perished.  _Wanted_ , it said, _for the attempted assassination of the Exalt_. The usual subscript, _may Naga hasten the criminal to justice_.

But it was the reward listed, above all else, which rankled Libra's ire, the prize of _ten pounds flour_  almost unquestionably from the rations Lady Maribelle had died to give a foolish king. It was that and that alone which would prevent Ylisstol's resentful citizens from merely glancing over the perpetrator and leaving him be-- or perhaps going so far as to clap him on the back, as Libra had once seen drunkards do through tavern-windows, wishing him "better luck next time, mate."

There was a part of him yet unsure how to feel about the assassin's failure. There was relief, in some sense, that it was still not too late for Libra himself to cast his own sort of wrath upon the king whose laws had whipped him bloody as a child, whose war had nearly starved away his whole country. There was a tense anxiety, too, that this mistake could cost him his own revenge-- the knowledge that an assassin existed would doubtlessly heighten castle security. Perhaps for a year, maybe longer.

(Libra had scouted ahead one night himself, learning through the sewer pathways how best to enter from below. He still had yet to figure out how he could feasibly get past the guards on the stairway.)

Those mutinous thoughts betrayed him, then; the depth of his pondering drove him distracted enough that he very nearly missed the subtle sound of shifting cloth-- and, more importantly, the near-silent _shhk_ of a blade pulled from its hilt.

Libra might have been forgiven for this lapse in vigilance: the man who'd caught him unaware took footsteps entirely without noise, and footsteps above all echoed there in the sewer-chambers, vacuous. Suddenly alerted to another's presence, he whirled around, pressing his vulnerable back to the nearest wall, and recalled thunder (Elthunder and Arcthunder and Thoron), but there was only enough light within him that his hands sparked and crackled-- not enough to strike anyone, not without a tome.

Standing opposite him, only the length of a pointed blade spanning the distance between them, there stood the assassin. Libra recognized him not because of his likeness' accuracy (which was minimal, if any), nor by his name (which had not been given, either by the man or his warrant).

Libra was by no means a short man, even in shoes so thin they had barely any soles at all. But if there had been one thing the flyer had gotten correct, it was the assassin's height-- an inch at least above Libra's, perhaps more. With his back against the wall and facing down the tip of a sword, even that little extra height felt more intimidating than anything Libra had experienced since becoming full-grown himself.

The assassin seemed to scrutinize him for a moment, glancing his figure up and down as if trying to assess a threat-- or perhaps a weak point. But then, to Libra's surprise, the blade lowered. And though the assassin did not deign to sheath his sword again, it was enough that Libra's shoulders cautiously inched away from the wall, the lightning between his fingers starting to dim.

"Dark mage," the assassin said-- and how strange it was to hear those words come with a note of relief. He added, as if by explanation, "You startled me."

" _I_ startled _you_?" And to Libra's embarrassment, his voice cracked high for the first time in nigh a decade. "You pointed a sword at me before I even noticed you."

"I thought you were in the Exalt's employ," and the assassin, abashed, covered his burning cheeks. "Your, uh, hair. It's the same color as a knight's helm... in this light. From a distance."

And then, Libra could not help it. He smiled, and it was not the wry, ironic thing he had thought all smiles to be but a sweet, bubbling amusement on the lips, so new a feeling that he but scarcely recognized it as his own. There was just something that struck him, for a moment, this flushing, awkward creature so completely at odds with the fearsome assassin at the hilt of a blade.

"What makes you so certain I will not turn you in, too?" he questioned, genuinely curious.

"The enemy of my enemy is my ally," said the assassin after a moment's thought. "The king of Ylisse makes no friends among sorcerers. Even in Ferox, we've heard that much."

"Feroxi," Libra turned his head to the side, rethinking the details of this stranger. "I thought your accent unusual for this part of Ylisse."

"Feroxi," that stranger agreed. "But not native."

"I see," Libra pursed his lips, attempting to place that tone he had never once heard. "... Plegian, then? Or perhaps the south of Ylisse?"

"... you haven't traveled much," said the assassin, more a statement of fact than anything else.

"I've never left the city," answered Libra, as if he had only just then realized it was possible to do.

The assassin was quiet for a moment. At last he said, "Valm. The continent."

"Only the continent?" Libra's brow furrowed. "No nation?"

"No," the assassin replied, terse. "It's gone. The land belongs to Chon'sin now."

"I see," said Libra in turn, wondering if Ylisse was on its way into that same nonexistence. Then, ventured cautiously: "My name is Libra... does the Feroxian have a name?"

"Lon'qu," said the assassin. He did not extend his hand to shake, then, as Ylisseans would do, but sheathed his blade, which to Libra, perhaps, meant even more.

"The enemy of my enemy," Libra recalled, as if testing those words upon his tongue. "Lon'qu."

"The enemy of my enemy," Lon'qu repeated, and reconciled that concept with the name: "Libra."

It was a strange friendship that began, then-- a first friendship, in Libra's eyes. And Lon'qu, whatever else may be said about him, was more used to making allies by the strength of his blade than through things so nebulous as _ideals_ and _words_.

A sort of kinship seemed to fall in place, peculiarly easy even alien as the emotion was to Libra, _had been_ to Libra. Lon'qu, too, carried the marks of a lifetime spent on streets and alleys: a heavy knot of lash-scars on his hands, burn scars dotting his shoulders, a criminal's brand against his calf which marked him _vagrant_ \-- barely legible, now, by the passage of time and newer wounds. What difference there was between them felt negligible at times (the country rat, the city rat), for vermin such as they held that palpable familiarity in having killed to survive, still yet killing to survive, survival at any cost.

It was different, Libra decided, from when he'd fought with other children on the streets over scraps and morsels, when they'd kicked him and stolen from him despite that mutual suffering, that understanding. Lon'qu felt... gentler, somehow, even in his aura, odd as it was to say about a man with all of his sharp edges. Lon'qu was armed five-times, ten-times better than even the worst of his tormentors, but yet, it did not feel so very frightening to call this man _co-conspirator_. It was as if he had somehow, in his travels, learned something of kindness, more than what little measly shreds Libra had attempted to piece together before.

Days passed, and then weeks and months, the smoldering remains of the city dimly aglow in the streets now that there was nothing left to truly catch fire. But still, that scant kindling burned, slow and heady as Ylisstol's blackened buildings smoked atop its red, red streets.

There in the catacombs they planned and plotted and waited for the rumors of assassins in Ylisse to quiet, for patrol-hours to slowly wane and knights' vigilance to grow lax with complacency. They bided their time, pooled their information, and readied what they could-- Lon'qu honing his blades, sharp-sharp-sharper; Libra with his dark tomes, lined wall-to-wall in private chambers, cleaned and restored from where they'd been burned away or torn apart or soaked through, illegibly, with blood.

It was more time-consuming work than sharpening over a whetstone, Libra searching his numerous tomes for the right runes to fill in the second half of a ranged Mire. The distance, he thought, would be necessary-- in order to evade the guards which had stood in his way the last time, Lon'qu would be forced to take up his bow in lieu of his preferred blades, doing enough damage to harm, yes, but not _quite_ enough to secure the kill. No, that honor should lie solely upon Libra and the subtleties of his magic.

And so he researched, as he often did, with Lon'qu quietly preparing meals in the background, the silent slide of daggers which had ended lives against vegetables which had been bought with them.

Libra who had never tasted domesticity, not even in his childhood, found himself at a loss for words to say. The idea that someone might prepare a meal for him, without the need of some ulterior motive or significant pay... it was a foreign thought. Not an upsetting one, by any stretch of the imagination, but strange enough that Libra was unsure if it was welcome, if it was _safe enough to feel_ welcomed.

He turned a page in his book, glossing over an edge ruddy with used blood. Nothing writ on the next page sank in, no matter how he tried to pull his eyes away from the assassin, skinning potatoes as easily as if they were men.

Just to have something to soothe his distractions, he began trying to converse: "Do you read?" he managed, for he had never seen Lon'qu pick up a book.

In turn, he glanced up at Libra for a moment, some mild surprise in his eyes as his hands stilled, taking the skin away mid-cut. "Some," Lon'qu at last said. "But no magic."

"Not even the anima tomes, used by mages in the light?" Libra addressed him with a mild curiosity, his head but slightly turned. "If one is familiar with the Ylissean alphabet, the letters are similar enough."

"No. Not even the monks' Edicts," Lon'qu snorted. "I know a few letters. That's it."

"I'm a bit surprised," Libra confessed. "You speak it so fluently... and even without being taught, it is not difficult to learn to read if you know what letters make which sounds."

"The Feroxi value action. Words carry little meaning," Lon'qu answered, lowering his eyes to his hands and beginning to work the knife once more. "Written ones, even less."

"I see," he said, and for what it was worth, Libra truly did. He'd had more than enough of the Crusader-King's punishments, justified through pretty speeches and words stolen from prayers. They meant nothing, _nothing_ when faced with cruelties he'd enforced, here among his own people. 

"Do _you_ read?" Lon'qu inquired in turn, but his eyes sought the answer to another question entirely.

"Some," Libra shut his eyes, tired from straining in the dark. "But only magic."

Lon'qu was silent, then, and only the sound of of his dagger's quiet scrape filled the vacuous, humid room. He mulled over that answer, how Libra's tomes had been unto him as Lon'qu himself had taken to the sword. Steadily, word by word, he at last pieced together a reply.

"I wouldn't mind it," Lon'qu began. "Learning to read."

Libra's voice came, soft. "You have decided Ylissean may be useful, after all?"

"Not Ylissean," Lon'qu replied, slow and careful. "Your... native tongue."

"Magic," Libra breathed, and marveled that Lon'qu had somehow guessed, had somehow known.

His answering nod and the tiny, tiny hint of a lip upward quirked-- Libra felt blown back, all of a sudden, by the rush of feeling that reached deep into some small softness his heart yet sheltered, calloused as it had become from years and years of harsh, cruel treatment at every turn.

And when Lon'qu came to his side, blade and vegetable both discarded, and learned to write the rune which was _his name_ , Libra's heart soared upon the skies like Elwind-Arcwind-Rexcalibur, those lightest of all _anima_ tomes, and feeling (rich feeling) carried the quiet flame he'd nursed to dizzying new heights, as if Libra alone could burn away all Ylisstol had ever been, could cleanse with fire its streets blood-red with sin. He had not known it until then; he had not ever learned-- there was a kind of fire that did not rely on _resentment_ to burn.

Libra had learned little of love, either, but had he known something of the word before, he would never have thought to connect it to the spinning-sick feeling within him, the hunger of starvation and the joy of satiation and the heady, blinding high of his most powerful of spells, a potent concoction of emotion that simmered deep within all parts of him.

He thought instead, _perhaps I am ill. Perhaps plotting high treason is getting to me._

But when they returned to planning the king's demise, it was not only hatred which drove Libra's hand anymore, but hope, nursed careful like a light. There was something yet worth saving within the walls of this ash-blackened city, a visitor though he might be, and this, more than any god who refused to intervene on their behalf, _this_ gave him faith.

"If we could but distract these guards, persuade them away from the castle," Libra said at times, running his finger over Lon'qu's hand-drawn map. "This one, and this one here. If there were a diversion, elsewhere in the city... those would be the first to leave."

"The first," agreed Lon'qu-- "But not the last."

"Yes... I suppose that's true. It well may be protocol for this guard here to extend their watch, or for one of the garrisoned few to deploy while the others on patrol neutralize the threat," Libra sighed, and penned a note in ink made from the city's own char. "I can't imagine that there isn't some variety of back-up plan."

"One staircase," Lon'qu scowled, looking to the map as if it had personally offended him. "The same that intervened last time when I evaded the other patrol."

"A lynchpin at either side, securing our foe from harm-- that if one should fail, the other should swoop in as soon as the threat is known," Libra traced his fingertip over a line, labeled in new-learned runes. Wistfully mused, "No diversion in the world would be enough to distract both. It was so even when Ylisstol burned at all hours of the day."

Lon'qu looked at him, then-- really _looked_ at him, meeting his eyes like so few had ever done. There was a tender look about him, unguarded, and then Libra felt blood, hot blood rise to his cheeks, but neither in rage nor shame as he'd oft associated it.

Libra knew he had a heart, that even sorcerers were not _heartless_ as they had been accused. But it had been an organ designed for _pain_ , in his mind, made only to fill him with blood and magic and fury. It beat now not in fear nor hate, but in giddy excitement, a strange sort of anxiety that made his hands tremble for something to do, too awkward to stay still.

He brushed a bit of hair from his face, then, and ventured the smallest of smiles in turn.

"Libra..." the assassin began, as reverent as a prayer-- as if it were Libra, and not Naga, whose divine will had made itself known.

Gently, deliberately, he lifted a trembling hand, a wrist that seemed so strangely naked without a blade strapped to the glove. His fingers, calloused from a lifetime at war, they reached but careful in the direction of Libra's cheek.

It was an unwarranted reaction to this man who had been nothing but kind: Libra flinched.

"Sorry," Lon'qu grunted, lowering his hand apologetically.

"No, _I'm_ sorry," Libra took a step backwards, abashed. "I didn't mean to-- that is, you _startled_ me. I just..."

"Out of reflex. Right," Lon'qu completed the thought, unable to meet Libra's eyes anymore. "My fault. I wasn't thinking."

"It's... it's all right," Libra's own hands shook, aching to reassure him with a touch he could not bring himself to take.

"I-- you--" Lon'qu fumbled for words a moment, the tips of his ears a bright red. At last, he managed, "... ink. Your cheek."

Libra gathered a corner of his cloak in hand, the remnants of a ruined Ylissean flag once pulled from some wreckage for warmth. He wiped the small smudge of char from his filthy cheek, a little piece of the city which had burned up too-brittle for even charcoal-pen. It struck him, for a moment, how very long it had been since he'd last bathed, since he'd last washed his hair. He was embarrassed, then, for his company-- never mind that Lon'qu was in little better condition.

"Thank you," he answered.

There was a moment of silence between them then, words yet unspoken hung loudly in the air. Neither of them ventured to speak first, standing there and resolutely staring down at the maps, at the walls, at anything but each other. Neither of them could put into words the things they truly wished to say.

It was Lon'qu who, at last, broke that stalemate. "The Plegians."

"Pardon?" Libra glanced up, if but slightly.

"The Plegians, reaching Ylisstol," Lon'qu said, with some small finality.

"The Plegians, here in Ylisstol," Libra's mind caught up to him quickly, evoked by the very image of it. "That could stir even the Crusader-King himself out of castle gates, much less his guards. Even at night. Even in the day."

"Yes," Lon'qu's brow lowered in thought, his eyes darting across the charts. "If they got past city walls."

"Plegians," said Libra. "Here, in Ylisstol."

"The enemy of my enemy," Lon'qu glanced to him, questioning, as if waiting for Libra's permission.

Libra sucked in a sharp breath. "The enemy of my enemy, indeed. Lon'qu... what you suggest is _insanity_. The Plegians..."

"They're better people than your king would have you believe," he replied-- and then, those words for Libra alone: "Like dark mages, in that way."

"I... they'll want revenge," Libra faltered, that softness of tone catching him off-guard. "They'll want revenge against all of Ylisse."

"So..." Lon'qu ventured after a moment. "You find something here worthy of salvation, after all."

"Salvation," Libra repeated, the meaning of that word lost to him years ago. "Perhaps. My country and countrymen have not been kind. The Exalted kings and their gods... they have not been kind. I should want that vengeance-- and in many ways, I do."

These words, above all, drew Lon'qu's curiosity: "What keeps you from taking it like this?"

The slightest of smiles graced Libra's mouth. "A low tolerance for hypocrisy."

"You mean," Lon'qu began slowly, choosing each word with care. "You wish to show them a kindness you desired. In spite of how little kindness they spared."

"Perhaps, when the war is over, things will change," and Libra's hope, at last, fully took root.

Lon'qu was silent for a moment. He pursed his lips. "Ylisse has been at war a long time," he said at last. And then, poignantly: "A very, _very_ long time."

"It has. I never knew anything else," Libra confessed. Then, like a secret, "But I think... I would like to, someday. I hope that answer does not disappoint you."

"No," and Lon'qu's lips curved upwards. "No. I'm glad of it."

Libra's shoulders released a tension he had not known they held. "Plegia... you believe they would not stamp out the entire nation of Ylisse, if given the chance to do so?"

Lon'qu gave that query thought, for a moment. "... the Hierophant Validar, perhaps. But. I know many who say his heir could not be more different."

"Many... you mean acquaintances in Ferox?" Libra bit his lip, remembering once more that Lon'qu had come from somewhere else before, that he had once existed outside of their life together in Ylisstol's sewers.

"Some," Lon'qu acknowledged. "Feroxi mercenaries, bought by Plegia's heir tactician. They say that General Robin hates the war. That they want peace as much as their people do."

"Glowing praise, to be certain," Libra commented, voice quiet with the effort of tempering his envy. His eyes searched Lon'qu's face for some hint of his feelings, "And... you trust this General Robin?"

"The Khan Regnant of Ferox respects them enough," Lon'qu's response was neutral. "He gives orders. I stab people. I think our roles are clear."

"But you would trust them with Ylisse," Libra replied. "You would trust them to show mercy to an enemy nation."

"No. Not yet," Lon'qu frowned at that quiet, troubling thought. "They are a stranger to me. I would not ask you to give them your trust."

Libra shut his eyes and mulled it over, considering everything they'd planned. Everything he had worked toward, and now, it was more than vengeance, more than love. Here was a nation of monsters (of demons, of hypocrites); here was their second chance. Libra had thought little of redemption, had not thought of it in years, but now he had come to realize how badly he desired it-- for Ylisse, the real Ylisse, and for the bloodied, sewer-dwelling demon its strife had raised.

"How will we get their army here?" asked Libra at last, and began to seek the weaknesses in Ylisstol's gates.


	5. Chapter 4: Vengeance

  **Chapter 4: Vengeance**  

* * *

Plans and actions each had their own time, and when the feasibility of it all at last assured them both, it was Lon'qu who left for Plegia-- who knew the roads, had contacts in the armies there.

It was a necessity, Libra knew. No trustworthy men lived on in Ylisstol; they had all been lost to warfare, to hunger, to the Crusader-King and his cruel idea of salvation. All who remained now were those who had learned a less forgiving kind of survival in a Ylisstol more than twenty years at war, a Ylisstol more than fifteen years afire. If such a person existed yet, Libra did not know their name.

The weeks were long and empty ones in the vacant, echoing catacombs beneath the city-- quiet, now, and so long destroyed that even the sewer-paths and canals ran black with the rotten ichor of blood long ago shed, homes and granaries burned until all that was left drained into the gutters along with the rain. None felt it more darkly than Libra, none had ever heard its call with such clarity, and without Lon'qu there at his side it was almost easy to forget _redemption_ once more.

Only crude maps, labeled in an unpracticed hand, and a single dagger mistakenly left atop a crate-- these served as his reminder that someone else had been here, had ever existed at all. Then, Libra could recall that kindness and loyalty and even human decency really did exist, that such things were not merely pretty words in fairytales or prayer-books, fictional even in the eyes of young children. Then, he had tangible proof that it was not all the mad hallucination of a man whose imagination had run wild with him.

What inner demons once controlled his heart found they had little power there now, unable to truly shake away the memory of hope, the lingering ghost of a hand which had almost touched his cheek.

Still, it was a surprise that his return was met with celebration-- not only Libra's, but that of greater Ylisstol.

"Plegia's hierophant is dead," they cried with joy in the streets.

And low beneath the paved roads, Libra whispered to his companion, "Pray die the hierophant of Ylisse." 

"The war is surely done," the citizens above wept with relief.

Said Lon'qu below, gloves stained still with blood, "This war is far from done."

"Is it your doing, then?" Libra questioned slowly. "That the hierophant of Plegia was killed, I mean."

"Depends," Lon'qu replied, beginning to remove his bladed cuffs.

"I mean," Libra paused, considering his words. "Did you kill him? King Hierophant Validar."

Lon'qu seemed to think on the question, its meaning. He answered, finally, "My blade ended his life. But many other things killed him."

Libra swallowed and sucked in a breath. "Lon'qu... that makes no sense."

"Poisoning. Slow," was his terse explanation. Then, with a grim look, "He was half dead before I even left Ylisse."

"Yet... you still raised your blade to finish him," Libra wondered-- merely _wondered_ , and not _accused_.

"I did," Lon'qu admitted.

"Without the Grimleal of Plegia to subdue, the Crusader-King will surely set his sights on Ferox now," Libra pursed his lips, something like worry in his form.

"He will," and Lon'qu gave pause in undoing his gloves. "He _has_. His armies have the orders."

"Already?" And even Libra, who had grown used to such treachery, found himself surprised. "Validar has been dead not even a week. Can there not be even that little peace?"

"The Prince-Commander... we discovered he received those orders before ever leaving the castle," Lon'qu crossed his arms, pensive. "Your Crusader-King never meant to have peace."

"So, then... what reason could you have to finish off the Hierophant?" Libra queried softly. "When such a task would bring war upon your own nation... surely you can't expect what's left of Ylisse to break itself against Feroxi forts."

"The Crusader-King won't live long enough for that," said Lon'qu, a dark set to his eyes. "It was the only way to get Plegians into the city."

"You mean... a more effective, less dangerous way than simply battering down the front gate," Libra's gaze narrowed as the details slowly clicked into place. "You couldn't mean-- no. The only way they would be willingly allowed into the city..."

"As prisoners," Lon'qu confirmed. "Of Ylisse's army."

Libra frowned, "I find myself hard pressed to believe that the General Robin had no issue with this whatsoever."

"It was their own idea." As if it was sufficient explanation: "They're mad. But genius."

"Mad, indeed," Libra murmured, brushing his hair from his face. "The Prince-Commander could gut them all the moment he has them in custody... if he is even slightly like his father, they will die before they even stand trial."

"And," Lon'qu answered carefully. "If he is more like his sister?"

"The crown princess, you mean?" A note of iron stole its way into Libra's tone, "I know not how anyone can believe in him, if that is true. Someone who cannot even begin to understand the hypocrisies their own father commits? Who still yet voices belief in those same gods whose names they evoke when they whip people to death, and call it salvation? Or, perhaps, is he an idealist-- one who thinks his Exalted father can still be made to see reason?"

"No," Lon'qu glanced away. "I meant... a person who wants peace."

Libra looked at him slowly, trying to read the very shape of his form, seeming to search for something there within his stance. Blades upon blades decorated his cloak, his belts, his hands-- a killer's bow was strapped to his back. But there, in the tilt of his shoulders and in soft, wounded eyes, there was some sign of yearning within.

And then, the fight melted away from him, back into the dark from whence it'd come. "Someone who wants peace."

"Who knows nothing of it," Lon'qu shook his head. "But wants it nonetheless."

A shiver ran up Libra's spine. Without speaking, he knew those words referred to far more than just some soldier-prince Libra had never met, had never even seen.

"Peace," repeated Libra finally, taking a seat upon some ledge. "There can be no question that Ylisse needs it. For the farmers and their grown children to return back home from the warfront, and turn their hands to grain production once more. For the soldiers to come, and put their axes to cutting lumber to rebuild, instead of cutting down foes. And, perhaps... perhaps even the healers and priests. If anyone could persuade what's left of Ylisse that there exists a Naga who is not the cruel face of the crusades, they are not here."

"A worthy cause," said Lon'qu slowly. "So I am told."

"I can only wonder at the hypocrisy of it all," Libra sighed, eyes lowering in thought. "Though it is peace I seek through the murder of Ylisse's king, am I not the same as him-- looking to kill in the name of an ideal I cannot truly understand? If he really believes what he has preached for as long as I can recall... then war, in his eyes, must be the same salvation to him that peace would be in mine. If we both believe to act in the name of some greater good we do not yet know, can I truly say that I believe myself more just?"

"He would kill them all," Lon'qu frowned.

"So would I," Libra gave a humorless laugh. "I have already started to... bleeding dry the citizens of Ylisse, those who would give up their lives and loved ones in exchange for some safety from starvation. Can such a person ever claim superior judgement?"

"Ylisse survived," Lon'qu answered, terse. "You have more to do with that than its king."

Libra exhaled, slow, at that. He pushed his bangs out from his face, trying to school the maelstrom within him into words. "You seem determined to make me out to be something I'm not. I'm... flattered, but I have killed too much, sinned too thoroughly to ever be considered a good man. My crimes could not be forgiven, not even if I lived all the rest of my days as the holiest of monks."

"Saint or sinner..." Lon'qu clenched his jaw. "You're human. You survived. They cannot fault you for it."

"Yes," said Libra dryly. "We all do terrible, terrible things to survive. But not all of us, in cold blood, can bring ourselves to murder a king for it."

And Lon'qu, his gloves stained with the blood of another king already, gave pause to that thought. Carefully, to but occupy his hands, he set his bladed cuffs down upon some table. "Then... after all this time, you come to doubt?"

Libra's eyes gazed soft, soft upon him, something profoundly sad within their depths. He asked, "Don't you?"

"Hired swords don't question orders," Lon'qu replied-- but, for a moment, hesitated. Quietly, almost too soft to hear, he admitted: "Sometimes."

Something like relief ran into Libra's veins, though _at what,_ he did not know. "Then... you have felt it too."

"The price of survival," Lon'qu shed his cloak, and it clattered to the ground with the echo of a dozen blades. "I've paid it. Many, many times. I do not dare to ask forgiveness from it."

"I want to believe it-- what the crown princess says, when walking through the ashes of Ylisse," Libra swallowed, feeling himself dangerously close to tears. "That there is a goddess, somewhere, who is merciful and kind. A goddess willing to forgive anyone who would let her into their heart. I... would like to believe it..."

"I know," Lon'qu replied, pressing his lips together, and at last, he sat beside him. "So would I."

"I do not know if it is possible," Libra trembled, then, and for the first time in many years, began to quietly weep.

Lon'qu averted his eyes, offering some small semblance of privacy. "I wouldn't blame you. If... you want no part of it."

"What would you do, if I disavowed connection to your plans?"

"I'd... find a way. Some way," Lon'qu stared down at his gloves, where the seams carried a lifetime of blood. "My contract. It wasn't yours to complete."

Libra inhaled, and wiped away his eyes with the least sooty corner of his cloak. "No. I suppose not."

"... I see." And to his credit, Lon'qu had already accepted that. He could no more ask it of Libra than he could shun his own motive.

"Your contract was never mine," Libra repeated. "Just as my vengeance was never yours-- just as Ylissean peace was never the responsibility of any of us, save for its unequal king. Even for the lives of their faithful, the gods will do nothing to help; they will not end his life in more natural ways. Yet if we are to ever have peace, if we are to have even a chance at it, something must be done to strike him down... by mortal men, if we must. I can no more turn my back on the matter than you can; my heart will not permit it. I will not abandon our cause as the gods have abandoned all of Ylisse."

His steely eyes belied a quiet sort of fire within them, a determination which fed off of every pain he had endured throughout his life-- a determination, yes, to ensure that no more would there be children born who did not know peace, who would never learn it from the charred-black remains of the city. Here and only here was a chance to at last do some kind of good, real good, despite the darkness in his tomes and in his heart.

"I won't ask it of you," Lon'qu said, fingernails instinctively picking at the small, dry red flakes still stuck to his gloves. The stains the left behind would not so easily disappear.

"I know," whispered Libra, his voice wavery with tears and flames both, neither quenched. "If I might but make a request?"

"Anything," Lon'qu replied, quiet. "If it is in my power."

"Let me strike the killing blow," answered Libra, pain blooming anew within his heart. "The king has a wound to answer for."

And when the Crusader's son came marching into Ylisse, haggard prisoners led by even more haggard knights, the king gave his welcome from a balcony high above the city. His eyes saw not their exhaustion but their victory, and declared his crusades' favor in the eyes of the gods despite his own army's thin, tired appearance. Despite this, the citizens could not rejoice-- for then, the king declared that their blades, if not their righteous triumph, would make the Feroxi see the error of their barbaric, godless ways.

"Barbaric," Libra frowned at that word, down where the storm drains carried even the voice of hypocrite-kings and their speeches. "He does not understand its meaning."

"Maybe," Lon'qu acknowledged, lockpicks heavy in his pouch. "Strength is the only Feroxi law."

"Better strength than bloodline," Libra clutched his tomes-- _Goetia, Waste_ \-- to his chest. "The strong, at least, must earn the respect of those who follow."

They trawled on through the turns of the catacombs, slipping quietly past canals run black, ducking beneath where the gutters leaked of all which had ever sluiced off the paved roads near the castle. As they neared the place where the sewers met the castle grounds, there Libra checked an abandoned detention tank-- the grate above long ago sealed by a paste of brick and mud. He found the weaponry they'd hidden within, damp but otherwise in good condition.

A questioning glance gave Libra his last chance to change his mind. He nodded, once, instead.

For all the king had taken care to secure the royal quarters above, the dungeons were remarkably ill-guarded. One pitiful recruit met his end at Lon'qu's arrow, silently shot; their significantly older cohort stood no chance against Libra's subsequent Arcfire. Two more patrol guards met similarly expedient ends-- and despite never once discussing it, they had silently agreed that this unlucky collateral should meet an end as swiftly and painlessly as possible.

The Plegians in their prison-cells seemed to spring into action as Lon'qu deftly picked at the locks which held them captive, Libra fumbling with a set of stolen keys opposite. There among their number stood a rather dark and solemn figure, a certain degree of command within their posture-- slim enough that they were nearly swallowed by their hooded coat, but yet, all those among the Grimleal seemed to defer to their judgement.

They pinned Libra with the slightest of smiles, "This is the associate you spoke of in Plegia, assassin?" 

"My friend," Lon'qu corrected with a grunt. "General."

"A pleasure to meet you at last," said the General Tactician with some finality. "I can't imagine a better stranger to have entrusted with our escape... Lon'qu speaks very highly of you."

Something like heat rose high in Libra's cheeks at that thought, for a moment stealing away the blaze of vengeance low within his heart. How suddenly he found himself at a loss for words, disarmed by the realization that Lon'qu had thought about him while abroad, that he had gone so far as to mention him to some tactician in that faraway land. 

He swallowed, then, and managed to reply, "Thank you. He speaks well of you, too."

"Hmm," they replied with a neutral sort of curiosity. "And of the weaponry I requested?"

"Yes," Libra took a steadying breath, once more recalling that this was still yet war. "In an unused detention tank in the catacombs, as much as I could obtain on short notice. Not two hundred feet from where the castle's wastewater meets the sewers. It's marked with a strip of knotted fabric. You'll find the exit site you requested about ten feet further down."

"Duly noted. Be sure to conceal yourselves well until you hear my signal," said the General, all professionalism. But then, with a note of softness, "You have my gratitude for this, stranger. Perhaps it has not reached Ylisse, but you cannot know how badly Plegia wishes to make peace."

"Somehow," answered Libra, and thought of Ylisstol's red-painted streets and an abandoned child, bleeding in the gutters. He pressed his lips together, "Somehow, I feel as if I have an idea of it."

General Robin assessed him with their eyes for a moment. Then, as Lon'qu picked open the bonds of the final captive, they finally seemed to make up their mind: "Whatever reasons you may have for taking up this endeavor, I thank you nonetheless. Godspeed, my ally."

And then, the Plegians slipped away into Ylisstol's underground, leaving their co-conspirators to lay in wait for the signal-- a bang of smoke gone up inside the castle gates, sealed off from its civilian citizens by a drawbridge, moat, and courtyard.

From a servant's stairwell near the entrance hall, necessarily concealed by the nature of its use, Lon'qu aimed quick arrows at the knights hurrying out, any small amount of aid for their allies past the wide-open gates. And in that dizzying rush of thundering bootsteps and crashing armor, Libra read out from those long-lost tomes of _Lightning, Ellight, Shine_ ; he learned what it could be to wage war in the name of something more powerful than mere mortality.

 _Peace,_ sang one half of his heart, yearning to learn what it could be. _Vengeance,_ sang the other half, and Libra felt relieved that they were yet one and the same.

It was only a matter of time before the king himself made his advance, able to sit by and watch no more. But the knights passed by, the garrisoned troops, and then servants, armed only with ladles and broomsticks. A mad sort of fervor possessed him as he called his children into arms-- even the youngest princess, untrained in battle, who could not be a recruit's age yet.

Emmeryn walked from the gates like a prisoner to the gallows, as if she knew already what crimes these people would have her answer for. Her brother, with Ylisse's treasured Emblem as a shield, looked as if he would block anything that might do harm his sisters, with his own body if need be.

But it was the youngest of that family who trembled, tears beading at her eyes as she inexpertly clutched a stave. She was not yet fifteen, Libra recalled; not yet even the age they threw children into recruit-training. Against the experienced Plegians, such a healer would serve no purpose save to offer some mild relief to a soldier already three-fifths dead-- or, thought Libra darkly, to serve as an extra body that would do nothing more than buy the king himself a moment's extra time.

It was this, above all, that drove the fury in Libra's heart to a fever-pitch; it was not the war or starvation or the whippings he'd suffered all through his youth, but _this_.

He could never stand a parent who would give their own child up for death.

Hatred, hot hatred ran within Libra's veins, and he recalled the angry fires of Ylisstol aflame and he recalled the throbbing, stinging heat of lashes, _onefivefifteentwenty_ upon his back, he recalled the agonizing ache of hunger, gnawing at his stomach as if it might burn a hole straight through him.

He recalled the sharpness of a man's hand, heat felt even through the glove, as it came down upon the back of his neck; he recalled his own hot blood oozing from the cut, wound and child both left unattended.

"I have to kill him," Libra breathed, the first real words he'd spoken in more than an hour.

And to his credit, Lon'qu did not question or doubt or remind him of some General's plan-- only said, "Okay."

Deft, silent feet led the way to the throne room, where the king sat before a scant handful of his sychophants and churchmen, proclaiming that Naga would soon see them all to victory as she had in battles past. Libra bit his cheek, enraged that the goddess whose name was thus evoked did nothing to assure him that she did not approve of these actions, if she even existed.

Perhaps it was better if she did not. That, at least, was preferable to a goddess who had disowned humankind, had left each and every one of them for dead.

Goetia came first, striking open the heart of some yes-man noble with a lance of pure magic crackling midair. Shock writ itself on those features, eyes drifting down towards where dark, fluctuating magic pierced their very chest. That most unstable of substances suddenly burst, the explosion shattering each rib with the impact, leaving nothing but a smoking corpse and embroidery, ruined with blood.

The cowardly Hierarch, self-invested to the end, was not given such an honor as he attempted to sneak away; Libra would not stray from his path towards the throne for the sake of so pitiful a priest. His tome of Mire summoned black, blood-darkened viscera from the very sewers he had made his home, the very gutters which had nursed him as a wretched excuse for a child-- and when the sludge exploded away, there was not even a body left.

One more fell-- this time, to Lon'qu's arrow, the assassin stepping in Libra's wake like a shadow. Then, with all that remained of the so-called noble court come to an end, there was only the Crusader-King, alone upon his throne.

He called for his guards. Employed in battle outside, none came.

The Crusader-King at last drew his sword, the Holy Blade Falchion which had lain in Ylisstol, as sanctimonious as its wielder and just as untouched by the travesties in Plegia and Ylisse. He swung for Libra, clearly the more aggressive threat, but he had not the warfield-practice of his son in many, many years. His blade did not strike true, the flat of Lon'qu's own serving as a makeshift shield.

Libra pulled open his book of Waste, this tome above all others swift. Then, possessed by some impulsive urge, he asked: "Have you any final words to say, Crusader? Any regrets you might wish to claim, before you leave to meet your gods?"

"None," the king scowled as the force of Lon'qu's blade at last pushed him back. "Only that I could not bring more godless hellions like yourself to justice!"

"Then I am left with no choice," Libra breathed, and then, his eyes sharpened. "Go in peace!"

He recalled every wound of nights past, of fathers' palms striking children's necks, of every lash stroke that had gone unhealed by this king's cruel economy. He remembered the other orphans who had beaten him in the streets when he had nothing more to steal, and the magic he'd cast in turn, staining the cobblestone and gravel red, yes, Ylisstol's red. He conjured there the image of executions, of whippings, of fires that had stained the very land. He thought on pity, aching pity, of the men and women and children he'd sacrificed to the dark rites that had fed this bloodied city.

The darkness within him, too, fed upon that pain, and with the blackest of all magic, he put a stop to that cruel king's blackened, merciless heart, suffocating him at once with the darkness.

As if he could do even half again that pain to this monster in the guise of a man, he struck once more, unable to stop his hands from lashing out, and again, and again he struck. Libra cried out and struck again, unable to stop the wail that erupted from his throat, the hot deluge of tears that ran away from his cheeks, and he cast, severing the head from the body with a snap and the sickening, visceral sensation of flesh tearing away, as if pulled in opposite directions until it ripped.

The pain within him was unceasing, and though he had cried before, now it was the wrenching sobs and hellish shrieks of a child repeated in the body of a man. Like a demon, he cried, and like a demon, he cast and cast and cast-- ripping away the arm of a body far past dead by now, snapping each knee backwards in the hope of a catharsis that would never come.

Somewhere through this haze came forth a voice: "Libra." And then again, " _Libra!_ "

That was enough to dredge him from this reverie, his entire body seeming to lurch backwards. With hands, trembling, he shut his book-- and his voice, too, trembling: "Lon'qu?"

"Libra," came the reply, an exhale of relief. He jerked his head in the direction of the stairs. "We should go. Before guards arrive."

"Yes," replied Libra faintly. His hand stilled over Goetia, as if debating whether even _this_ would suffice.

Lon'qu glanced at him up and down, as if seeking something. Then, without further question: "Is this finished?"

Libra looked upon all that remained of Ylisstol's king, its ignoble court, as if for the first time seeing what destruction his own hands had wrought. He surveyed the blackened remnants of bodies, charred through their contact with sharp, burning-cold magic. The spatters and trails of blood upon the white marble floors, as if an artist had dashed a bit of color there for intrigue. The throne which lay with its seat sundered, Falchion's blade decisively cleaving it in two.

And by the gods-- whether they were real or fiction or had abandoned humanity altogether-- Libra prayed that the blood which spattered Ylisstol's throne room that day would be the last this war would spill.

"It is finished," he said, and the fever within him cooled at last.


	6. Chapter 5: Tomebreaker

  **Chapter 5: Tomebreaker**  

* * *

That day in Ylisstol, Exalt Emmeryn and the Hierophant Robin brought their two nations to ceasefire, and then, quickly, truce.

Their goal a more neutral ground for negotiations, the Hierophant suggested to continue the discussion some miles to the south, in a border-town off the lands which had once belonged to Themis-- a land which had been Ylisse's most loyal duchy, though its noble line lived on no longer. This was agreeable to the Exalt, the tenderhearted young woman, and when she returned to the capitol not even a fortnight later, there was at last a treaty. Those nations came at last to peace.

And when all was said and done, when news of the agreement reached Ylisstol at last, there within its catacombs an assassin could no longer afford to stay.

"I... should go," said Lon'qu, terse but not unkind. He offered the explanation, "They'll want the news in Ferox."

"Yes," replied Libra, quiet, wrapped in his yet-bloodstained cloak. The marks would not wash out, no matter how he scrubbed. "Yes. I suppose, for Ferox's sake... you should."

"I..." Lon'qu hesitated, halting. "Will... you be okay?"

"What will you do," began Libra softly, "if I say no?"

"Stay," he replied simply-- as if there were no other answer in his mind.

"Then... I suppose it is fortunate that is not the case," but Libra did not meet his eyes. "Let it not be for my sake you delay your business."

"Libra..." he started cautiously, unsure of what he meant to say.

"Don't worry for me," he answered more firmly. "Do you not have a contract to answer for?"

"I do," Lon'qu's brow furrowed. "As little a part I played in it."

"You charted a pathway through the castle. You plotted to bring the Plegians into Ylisse," Libra gave a small, wry chuckle. "You have even slain one hierophant already. I cannot imagine a contractor who would hold it against you that the finishing blow was not yours."

"Right," Lon'qu inhaled sharply. "And... you are sure...:"

"I'll be fine," he said, as if too assuring himself of that fact. "I got by without you for many years, you know."

"I know," Lon'qu steadied his breath, strapped the blades back onto his gloves. He hesitated, and then: "I'll return."

"I know," echoed Libra faintly, clenching his fingers in his clothes. Not even he was sure how much he believed those words.

But Lon'qu's contract yet drew him away, and however reluctantly he left, still too did he leave. Libra shivered at the cold of the catacombs, then, noticing their hollow stillness for the first time in weeks. His heart cried out at the vacancy; his mind summoned to the forefront, unbidden, a memory of a child clinging to his mother, anywhere small hands could grasp, pleading not to be left alone in some strange place unknown to him.

And Ylisstol, indeed, was soon unknown to him-- the black ash of burned flags and fear-reddened streets giving way, at last, to the white, white bloom of peace, the unmarked flags which flew that day of Emmeryn's formal coronation. The blood which had been spilled across the fields of Ylisse did not rot but fertilized the ferrous soil, and now that the time for horror was over, the last alive could pretend they had forgotten the horrors they'd committed.

The clerics turned their staves to healing the bodies, the minds, the very souls of the Ylissean people, absolving them of their char-black sin. Plegian envoys came, trading granite and pale sandstone for Ylissean lumber and rope, and those who were once soldiers came and moved away the charred ruins that had once been part of a city. In time, too, the merchants came bearing grain and goods from the farming-towns' first new harvest, and wiped the streets outside their storefronts free of debris, covering up ichor and char with limestone gravel and chalk-- alkaline like soap, leaching away the grime with every subsequent rain.

Part of Libra wondered if the Ylisstol he had known were not merely a bad dream, summoned into the imagination of a frightened child who had wandered alone upon the streets a few years too long. Part of him feared it, wondered if the assassin who had once haunted these catacombs, too, did not exist-- some vague concept of comfort invented by a man who had but little experience of it.

And when the city above was repaired and its white stone polished until it shone, even the sewers below ran with water clear enough that, in the daylight, Libra could make out his own bedraggled, dirty reflection marring the scene.

He was possessed, for a moment, with an intense urge to bathe. But although clean, potable water was no longer scarce, and even men such as he could find a square of soap to spare, he found those efforts unsatisfactory, skin burning pink with the sting of lye. Too much yet still polluted his heart, clouding his mind with thick plumes of smoke even after the fires died out-- it showed, he thought, leaking through the pores of his skin.

And when the moon, too, came into its brightest form, silvery, the Plegians arrived once more as allies of Ylisse, their Hierophant Robin leading the parade with soft, mysterious smiles. The Exalt Emmeryn welcomed the envoy warmly, with every show of kindness and goodwill and hope to leave behind the strife and tension of their past.

Libra listened to the speeches from afar, there in the echoing caverns where Exalted voices could still reach. He heard footsteps in their approach, then, light-- but he did not turn around. That the visitor had made any sound at all proved they were not the one he was most desperate to see.

A woman's voice cut into his reverie: "So," she said. "This is Ylisstol's famous sorcerer."

"Infamous instead, perhaps," replied Libra, mildly. He glanced at her, for a moment. "May I have the name of the one who wishes to know?"

"Tharja," she replied, her Plegian accent thick. She pursed her lips, "We met before, once. Very briefly."

"I'm afraid I don't recall," Libra admitted cautiously, hand inching slightly towards his tome.

"Heh... made a few too many enemies, have you?" she gave a low, dark chuckle. "You can forget it-- if I were here to end you, it'd already be done. You broke open my shackles that day in Ylisstol, three fortnights past."

"... I see," said Libra, and once he ascertained she had no intent of reaching for her own spell-book, lowered his own hand. "What brings you here, then? I am afraid I must presume that it is not gratitude which brings you to the catacombs at this hour."

"You presume false," she replied for a snort. "Though... not like it's _my_ gratitude. The Hierophant is, for their own reasons, _invested_ in what becomes of you. They asked me to seek you out. Convey well-wishes, or some sappy sentiment like that."

"Then your job is complete," acknowledged Libra. "I have received the message."

"Hm," answered Tharja neutrally. She narrowed her eyes in his direction, "I have heard tales of you, Sorcerer of Ylisse. They say you rise out from the darkness of the sewers at night, crawling up from the openings in the streetside gutters. They say you abduct the lost children of Ylisstol, drag them down by their feet to sacrifice them in blood-rituals below. They say you are a monster, grotesquely disfigured, or perhaps some half-demon too horrible to behold in the light. And as for your killing the old king of Ylisse... well." Here she gave a sinister cackle, "Like everyone else in the castle that day, I saw the body myself."

"Your sources make false claims... common ones, perhaps, but false," Libra wetted his lips, too-dry, and swallowed hard. "Save for that which you have seen with your own eyes. That... I cannot absolve myself the credit for."

"And here I thought _I_ was a piece of work," she lifted an eyebrow at him, mildly impressed. "I wonder... do you even realize what you are?"

"I know myself to be a sorcerer, stranger," Libra frowned, unable to keep the defensive edge from stealing into his tone. "I know myself to be a sinner, and a hypocrite. You don't need to tell me."

"So this is the state of magical education in Ylisse..." Tharja muttered. "Tell me, then. Do you even know why Ylisse's Crusader-King banned dark magic in the first place?"

"Because," Libra faltered. "Because the Edicts of Naga forbade it, and he was a religious fanatic."

"True enough, I guess," Tharja scoffed, beginning to pace as she spoke. "Maybe the Ylisseans have forgotten. Dark magic opens a gateway to the gods of destruction within its wielders-- a gateway which, if thrown open wide enough, can lead to those gods taking control of your body through magic, erasing all memory and personality. For the Grimleal, it's religious... no different from when Ylissean priests pray to their _beloved Naga_. But you... _you,_ without gods either light or dark... you walk a dangerous path."

"And if I do not believe in gods?" questioned Libra, a note of steel hidden in his tone. "What should that mean to me, then?"

"Believe or not, it makes no difference," Tharja snorted, as if the very idea of _not believing_ was laughable. "Either way, the madness will possess you in the end. Whether you forswear magic for the rest of your life or cast the blackest spells days in and out... I have only ever seen one man more corrupted by the darkness than even you."

"So even the Grimleal believe me to be damned?" Libra lifted his chin.

"Grimleal, Naganic... those words mean nothing. Like a rod of dynamite with its fuse already lit..." Tharja's eyes pierced him with their sudden sharpness. "You're a ticking bomb of magic and fury, just _waiting_ to explode. I know it. The Hierophant Robin knows it. And that look in your expression... it says that somewhere, deep in what heart you have left, you know it, too."

Libra shivered, feeling very much like his mind had been stripped bare of every defense he'd erected over the years, every spell and seance he'd learned. "There is, I admit... something of a stronger, more _vengeful_ rush behind my spells these days."

"Then, you're _not_ as blind as you come across," the corner of Tharja's lip quirked upwards into a smile. "I should have known. Only one with as little magical talent as the Feroxi Second could be so blind to your situation-- in your heart and your magic both."

"You mean... Lon'qu," Libra managed, hoping against hope that he _had_ been real, after all.

"On familiar terms with him, are you?" Tharja glanced down at her nails for a moment, then back up at Libra. "Forget not knowing what you are. Do you even know what _he_ is?"

"I _do_ know what assassins do, sorceress," Libra frowned at her condescension. "I have seen him kill with my own eyes."

"Feigning stupidity will get you nowhere, Ylissean," Tharja warned. "I _meant,_ do you know what he is to Ferox? The Western clan, at least. Don't deign to insult my liege Robin by suggesting they would randomly, without knowledge or recommendation, just throw the lives of all their men into the hands of a common _assassin_."

"I fail to see why not," Libra pressed his lips together, now genuinely perplexed. "They had no issue accepting the aid of a common vagrant from the streets of Ylisse."

"A vagrant _highly praised_ by the Khan Regnant's Second," Tharja whirled upon her heel, the realization coming down upon her all at once. "You have no idea, do you."

It was not a question.

"I've never left Ylisstol," Libra admitted, feeling so very wrong-footed by the confession.

"You don't seem _completely_ stupid. Figure it out," Tharja tisked, decisive at last. "The Khan Regnant, the West Khan... whatever you want to call him, he's the ruler of Regna Ferox about half the time. His right hand man is called the Second. Fights wherever the Khan wants him to fight. Stabs whoever the Khan wants him to stab. And if the Khan goes down in battle... like the second in a duel of honor, _he'd_ be the one tasked with its resolution. Treaty or blade, his choice."

A growing sense of dread settled in Libra's stomach. "That's... not a normal assassin's contract." He hesitated, and then, "If I didn't know better... I would say you're attempting to tell me that he's a _prince_."

" _Second_ ," corrected Tharja with an ironic snort. "They pick them by merit of strength, in case you're wondering... and Khan Basilio has no children to bias his choice. My liege trusts your assassin friend for his contract of honor with the Khan, nothing more-- it's well known he had no love for the Ylissean king who called the _Feroxi_ barbaric."

"I... I see," and Libra lowered his eyes, unable to conceal the maelstrom of thoughts revealed within them. More to hide his true expression than out of any real curiosity, he questioned: "You disagree with the assessment, then?"

"Feroxi tradition makes little sense to me," Tharja glanced over her shoulder in Libra's direction. "But they're civilized where it counts. More than the men of Ylisse, anyways. Ask any Plegian old enough to realize we were at war... and I guarantee they'll say the same."

And with those last words, she left-- like everyone else, without a farewell.

The specters of those truths, however, lingered in her wake, doubt gnawing deep into Libra's heart. The question ran rampant in Libra's mind: had Lon'qu, the one he'd known, ever _truly_ existed?

Was it perhaps a deliberate deception by the Feroxi, ordering him to conceal his title from all Ylisseans in fear of retribution? Was the entire persona fabricated in order to secure Libra's cooperation, only to dispose of him when he was no longer useful? Was the Plegian sorceress but lying about their political connection, attempting to prevent him from ever seeking out the Hierophant Robin's acquaintance again? Had Lon'qu's personality ever truly been his, or was it _Libra_ who had been the one to superimpose some invented ideal upon the first person to show him some small courtesy?

And the worst of those thoughts was that Lon'qu had not attempted to conceal anything at all. That he considered the title altogether irrelevant when faced with such a trifling acquaintance, one with neither resources nor armies to aid his nation, save for an intimate knowledge of the drainage system underneath Ylisstol. That... he had actually wished to further the friendship on a personal level, unfettered by such things as titles and politics and planning the assassination of Ylisstol's king.

That thought that he existed as more than a figment of Libra's imagination was the most torturous of all, haunting him so that he lay awake all hours of the night. The gentle expressions, the quiet words, even when he had been hiding so essential a truth... could they have meant something, could they have ever meant _anything_ , as Libra privately hoped at times?

And then, the thought (with reality come crashing in) that he had been genuine in his kindness, but intended for nothing more than to come of it save a kind of camaraderie that assuaged his own pain and pity. The most, if not the _only_ thing a foreign prince could feel for a Ylissean wretch.

No matter the answer, Libra's heart remained constant in his wish to be close again, to be closer than they'd been even before, to (at last) let Lon'qu lay a hand upon his cheek and (at last) learn what it could be to touch. His mind burned with longing, threatened to burn away altogether as the days and nights passed, but Lon'qu still did not return.

A child's piteous cry came unbidden to his memory, and the darkness therein fed upon his fear. Madness clasped the foothold of his heartbreak, ascending by ever-higher degrees.

When the people of Ylisstol no longer came buying bread with their spilled blood, Libra's own thirst for it became all the more readily apparent to him. He could not but look upon another person without the thought of rending them open on some ritual-room floor, and to his horror, he found himself missing it: the visceral feeling of his magic ripping flesh from human bone, the rush of power as the realms themselves bent to his will. His mind grew hazy with smoke, at times, his hands reaching for those spells before realizing, partway through, what they were about to do.

He thought upon Tharja who, at the very least, had no motive to lie about _this_.

The priests and clerics called now, in the street-corners above, for the salvation of Ylisse-- true salvation, they claimed, not by swords or tomes but by patience, generosity, doing good by one's fellow man. Exalt Emmeryn's ideals, supplanting her warlike father's. Perhaps not even a decade ago, the kindness of such words would have swayed him-- but now, even if he wished to believe with all his heart, he knew himself to be among the already-damned, dark magic pulsing in his veins and in his mind.

His limbs found themselves in motion against his control, the magic outspread by their extension possessing a life of its own, a will that was not his. It had been limited to small fires, thus far. But there was a danger within him brewing, and he grew to resent it, dark and low.

It was true he had cast sacrificial magic to save his own life; it was true he had cast it to save the lives of others. It was true he had cast it in the name of some higher good-- but now, when it threatened to take him over completely and destroy all the good he had ever achieved, hot anger ran through his veins.

Then, he had not known what harm he had done himself, what evil he had committed, and suddenly he found himself _hating_ dark magic, hating the very idea of it. The knowledge was too dangerous to fall into flawed human hands anymore-- for the public, for the user, it did not matter.

At last he understood the fervor with which the Crusader-King had hunted down every sorcerer in Ylisse, every dark-mage beyond its borders, and loathing for himself (his magic, his hypocrisy) filled Libra's mind. Without tomes he called upon that fire, fire in its very emblem, for the flames within his thoughts and heart had reached a fever-pitch.

He set ablaze the dark spellbook he held within his hands, and those pages burned away into the night, curling with heat as the binding began to melt.

There within that tome had been the nursemaid that saw to his nourishment, the only bedtime story afforded a child who had no-one to read to him. There was his companion on the coldest of those lonely nights in the gutters, slush icing in the red, red streets, and there was the weapon that saved Libra's blood from contributing to the stain.

There, now, was the kindling for a pyre.

Libra threw that tome to the floor, compounding it with a second one. Then, the rest of his collection, dark spells he had labored over in evenings past, searching for the lost notes of their completion. He piled that once-sacrosanct knowledge into the flames, and when they did not burn hot enough, quickly enough, he began tearing away the pages of Flux, Ruin, _WasteNosferatuGoetia_ \-- tome after tome, the binding and thread ripped asunder by Libra's hand.

They caught aflame with such haste that Libra's fingers singed at the tips, already aching as he broke the pages from their spines (now Elfire, Arcfire, Bolganone). He sobbed and wept at their loss, even as he destroyed them magicless: no magic, now, when it was so liable to the wilderness of the dark. Now, he thought, he would be truly alone-- not even the familiarity of his childhood abominations to comfort him anymore.

His magic was a part of him, its darkness seeped into his very flesh. He'd destroyed the very thing which had been his savior, his caretaker there within the bowels of Ylisse, the only power he held within this world.

(Men like him did not deserve the power they possessed.)

That pyre raged, the flames climbing so high that their light touched upon the streets above as they laid to rest the last dark magic there in Ylisstol. All paper it could reach turned to the black of ash, darkened by the red, red, white-hot flame.

And when the last of the tomes lay burned through, the only evidence they ever existed in the papercuts on Libra's fingers, the sorcerer lay in silence there, deep beneath the earth. His tears ran dry at last, chest heaving with exertion as he sprawled over the floor, and this, he knew, would be his end.

He was long beyond the hope of salvation, now; he was beyond even Naga's reach. Though Exalt Emmeryn preached forgiveness and kindness and all the warmth that light could afford, those promises of the gods did not find Libra the child he had once been, who would have found comfort in those words. No, for though he had already turned away from the dark, neither was he strong enough to walk fully in the light.

An empty sickness gnawed at his soul, his magic rebelling viciously in his restraint as it yearned to break free. Soon, he would perish, and perhaps that would be penance enough.

But there, in the last glowing embers, Libra fancied he saw an apparition, tall and strong and all too familiar to him. Where he stepped, boots made no sound even in the vacuous expanse of Libra's ritual-chamber. His eyes batted shut-- it was fitting, he thought, that the gods should send to him the man who most resembled an angel of death in his mind.

"Lon'qu," he breathed. "I thought you left for Ferox."

"I returned," Lon'qu replied, so tersely that Libra wondered if he were real after all. "The roads are bad. The delay was... unwanted. But necessary."

"They must be very bad, indeed," replied Libra, mildly dazed as he urged his eyes to open. "If it prevented travel for nearly a twelvemonth..."

"Not the roads themselves," explained Lon'qu, even his tone seeming to frown. "Ylissean brigands-- ambushing caravans at the border."

Libra looked upon him, trying to discern the details of his face as if to imprint it in his memory forever. Then, at last, he begged for the proof of that most haunting news: "Was that a job of yours, or merely a duty of the Khan's Second?"

Lon'qu stiffened visibly at that accusation, and in his stance, gave those words their truth. "They refused to see reason. Khan's second or no."

"Then... my information is not false, after all," Libra's brow furrowed in thought as he considered the ramifications. "You, a Khan's Second. The Feroxi equivalent of a prince, no less than the Ylisseans' Lord Chrom."

"I'm no prince," Lon'qu shut his eyes, as if he were unworthy to say the very word. "Just an urchin with a sword. The title means nothing. Just some proof of a tournament win."

"Proof of strength, you mean," Libra's lip turned upwards, bemused by this humility. "And did you not once say yourself that strength is the only Feroxi law?"

"I did," Lon'qu answered, and hesitated. "It was never my intent to deceive you."

"I know."

Lon'qu gave a cautious pause. "Are you... upset with me?"

"To the contrary," Libra replied, wan but warm. "I am relieved. A Ylissean sorcerer's life... its loss cannot mean much to a Feroxi lord."

It was this reaction, above all, which prompted Lon'qu to ask: "Are you... unwell?"

"Unwell," Libra repeated faintly. "Yes, I suppose that is the word for it."

His vision swam for a moment, and when his eyes righted themselves at last, Lon'qu was kneeling on the floor beside him, unbuckling his bladed gloves and fumbling for a roll of bandages. "Where are you wounded?"

Libra laughed-- a hoarse, dry noise. "I'm not wounded, Lon'qu," he said, something about that reaction so very much like him that Libra could possess no more doubt that he were real.

Lon'qu's brow furrowed, confusion etching itself in the way he pursed his lips, "Then you are ill."

"Perhaps, from a certain point of view," Libra sighed, and his body melted back into the stone of the floor where so many others had met their end before him. "My magic... I suppose you could say it's rebelling against me."

"Rebelling?" Lon'qu frowned. "Or _revolting_?"

"Does it matter?"

"Yes. To me," Lon'qu gazed down upon him, something soft and vulnerable about his face in the faint glow of still-hot ashes.

It was vindicating to see him like this, his sharpest edges shed in favor of something warm and gentle, like the faith Exalt Emmeryn had so vociferously praised but far more _real_. Libra's heart wrenched in that moment, and he selfishly wished for more time. But his magic lurched within him, more the master of his body than he himself, and he knew what he must answer.

"It's revolting," he said-- "Like a kingdom desperate to unseat its king. Lon'qu... you must go. Even though I would not wish to take yet another life, soon it will no longer be my choice whether my magic chooses to act or not."

"You mean... you want me to leave," Lon'qu whispered. "So when your magic lashes out, there is only one life left for it to take."

"Yes," Libra exhaled, relieved that he'd understood. "Please. I beg of you, go."

"And if I refuse?"

"You mustn't," Libra entreated, locking his elbows in when they attempted to jerk forth. "You... it will want to take you down with me."

Lon'qu was silent for a moment. "I see," he replied, but did not move to leave.

The wilderness within him seemed all the less controllable for those words, as if his magic knew how easily it could claim another victim. Libra clenched his fist, hard, in a diaphanous sleeve. "What will it take for me to persuade you to go?"

A moment of thought, and then: "I've heard stories. For children. Stories about... breaking spells. And curses."

"I won't stop you if you wish to try," Libra's eyes gently batted shut. "But you must promise me, Lon'qu, to leave this place before I hurt you."

"I promise," Lon'qu replied, his breath but ghosting over Libra's cheek.

And with the careful brush of lip upon lip, he bestowed upon him first human contact Libra had experienced in years. A tender warmth bloomed within Libra's chest, his heart aching no less than if Lon'qu had taken it within his hands and squeezed, such sorrow as to be agony that this could not last. He regretted it, that they had waited so long to truly _touch_.

The kiss ended all too soon for either of their liking, but Libra could not help but break it with a sharp gasp, the surge of his magic running through him like a knife.

"Go," he begged, biting his lip and furrowing his brow. Pain, pain, and then: " _Go!_ "

Lon'qu exhaled, then, as if all his hope escaped him in that one breath. He laid one last, gentle kiss to Libra's brow, tears beginning to drip down his cheeks-- and then, with silent footsteps, he slowly walked away.

The last of the ashes burned out, white.


	7. Epilogue: Miracle

  **Epilogue: Miracle**  

* * *

"I have done all that I can do."

Those words reached him, vague and indistinct as if they were warped by the thick, wavery muting of a sound from beneath the water. His head swam heavily, bogged down by some viscous, amniotic presence which had made his mind its embryo.

"... there must be some other action I can take," came another voice, but the lowness of their pitch did little to improve their clarity. 

"It is out of the hands of mortals, now," the first voice soothed, the tone comforting in a strangely universal way. "You did everything you could, coming in search of me so quickly. All that is left is to pray."

"Pray," repeated the other, and something about the sad, quiet softness of that word prickled at some memory half-drowned. "You mean... you cannot save the dead."

"Perhaps," was the gentle reply. "But sometimes, miracles exist."

He drifted in the silence that those words evoked, unable to truly connect their meaning together in his sluggish, waterlogged mind. Any sense he had of the world at all felt as if it had washed out to sea, never again to touch upon solid shore. He had, he believed, some vague inkling that there had been fire, once, that there had been pain-- and this mind had belonged to a body, once, pulling away from it in incandescent, watery streaks, like pigment fading in the rain.

It was a peaceful sensation, if not quite a pleasant one, to be separated from everything else as if by a misty veil. He was not sure what to make of it when something, an implacable _something_ held him back from wandering on into that cool serenity, and the particular familiarity of those words, spoken low: "I left the gods a long time ago."

"You would not be the first to do so in these times," murmured the that other voice, more nebulous and imperceptible here than ever. "But we cannot find what we never attempt to seek. Be it the gods... our peace..."

And that voice that was known to him uttered one word, quiet, as if it wrenched the heart from him to lease it to the air: " _Libra._ "

Then, memory came rushing in, some invisible floodgate opened-- the recollection of a child, choosing his name out of a tome of dark magic, an orphan suffering upon the streets of cruel Ylisse. A name they left omitted in rumors of a demon in the city catacombs, when all the other dark mages died out, who had been the one to end the life of a faithful, selfless noblewoman once, a sacrifice that perhaps he better understood in time.

He remembered plots born in the city sewers, assassins and lords who knew nothing of peace and yet fought for it with hope in their blades. He remembered freedom, yes, and viscera, vengeance-- for these, too, could be all three in the same. He remembered daggers turned to slicing vegetables in lieu of hierophants, and bloodied gloves.

Reluctant partings and eager returns, thumbs which had nearly wiped the dirt from his cheek and so too his sin. These came back to him all at once, a rush of warmth, and then, the memory of lips upon his, and tears; he'd thought that to touch might be bliss, _it might be heaven_. Even the recollection of that sensation took his breath away, so sharp an exhale that he could not remember his breath ever ceasing, and Libra's heart, once more, began to beat.

They will someday tell tale of a fire that rose in the streets of Ylisstol that day, burning out what little darkness there yet remained. Up from their perch in the castle, the pegasus knights would be credited with seeking out the flame's source, fearing yet further discontent among the people. They will someday report that Exalt Emmeryn, ever a beacon of peace, strode out to the site herself in search of its cause, and they will say, in stories told around campfires late, late at night, that she discovered only a mysterious a ritual-chamber set ablaze within the catacombs, the wicked, demonic sorcerer below and his hidden stash of dark tomes both burned to naught but cinders.

But in this case, if not all, it was only Emmeryn who truly knew what therein transpired; she who had answered the plea of peace's ally and set her own hands to the task. Warm magic then flowed betwixt her fingertips, a blessing of the gods placed in mortal hands, reaching out to this last piece of Ylisstol that the light had not yet touched.

"Hello?" she called out to the man laying before her. "Can you hear me?"

And Libra, at last, opened his eyes.

* * *

* * *

**Author's Note:**

>  **Spoiler-y warnings:** Descriptions of Wounds (particularly lash wounds and dark-magic wounds), Descriptions of Scarring, Bodily Fluids (including urine, blood, and rotting blood), Past Human Branding, Cognitive Dissonance (caused by fear of abandonment), Patricide, Loss of Physical and Cognitive Agency (due to dark-magic related mind control). Child Endangerment tag refers to neglect, starvation, physical abuse, and death (regarding more than one child character).
> 
> Many characters die in this fic, but mostly ones unnamed in canon. If you are uncomfortable with specific playable characters coming to harm (and/or no longer existing due to AU circumstances) here is a list of named FEA characters who either die or have their entire existence redacted. If Creator's Style is activated, highlight to read: Miriel, Gaius, Panne, Gregor, Henry, Maribelle. Libra, but only temporarily. Indirectly causes Laurent, Yarne, and Brady to un-exist.
> 
> Thank you for reading.


End file.
